The space charge effect has been clearly observed in the energy distributions of picosecond pulse beams from a spin-polarized electron microscope, and was found to depend upon the quantity of charge per pulse. The non-linear phenomena associated with this effect have also been replicated in beam simulations that take into account of a three-dimensional space charge. The results show that a charge of 500 aC/pulse provides the highest brightness with a 16-ps pulse duration, a 30-keV beam energy, and an emission spot of 1.8 μm. Furthermore, the degeneracy of the wave packet of the pulsed electron beam has been evaluated to be 1.6 × 10−5 with a charge of 100 aC/pulse, which is higher than that for a continuously emitted electron beam despite the low beam energy of 30 keV. The high degeneracy and high brightness contribute to the realization of high temporal and energy resolutions in low-voltage electron microscopy, which will serve to reduce radiolysis damage and enhance scattering contrast.

The brightness and interference fringes of a spin-polarized electron beam extracted from a semiconductor photocathode excited by laser irradiation are directly measured via its use in a transmission electron microscope. The brightness was 3.8 × 107 A cm−2 sr−1 for a 30-keV beam energy with the polarization of 82%, which corresponds to 3.1 × 108 A cm−2 sr−1 for a 200-keV beam energy. The resulting electron beam exhibited a long coherence length at the specimen position due to the high parallelism of (1.7 ± 0.3) × 10−5 rad, which generated interference fringes representative of a first-order correlation using an electron biprism. The beam also had a high degeneracy of electron wavepacket of 4 × 10−6. Due to the high polarization, the high degeneracy and the long coherence length, the spin-polarized electron beam can enhance the antibunching effect.

Pulse-mode operation was realized in spin-polarized transmission electron microscopy (SP-TEM) using a laser-driven electron gun with a GaAs-GaAsP strained-layer-superlattice photocathode. TEM images were acquired with a pulsed electron beam with a 5-μs pulse duration. Phase locking of wobbling TEM images was demonstrated using a pulsed beam with a 1-kHz repetition frequency, which matched the image wobbling frequency. It was found that in composite images formed by superimposing 2 × 10(4) separate single-pulse exposures, the amount of image blurring due to wobbling was a linear function of the pulse duration. These results suggest the possibility of pump-probe measurements in SP-TEM using the pulsed electron beam as a probe, allowing nanometer-scale time-resolved spin mapping.